Manage Your Daily Activity Traffic, Part 2 of 3, By Trapper Woods

Red activities are both vital and urgent. When faced with a red activity STOP whatever else you are doing and do the red activity NOW!

As red activities pop up during the day, they aren’t hard to recognize. Just ask my brother Paul. Paul is in his late fifties. He’s a handsome man with a bit of gray hair around his temples. He dresses tastefully and works in a jewelry store. Upon entering his store one is overcome with a feeling of elegance.

On this particular day he was showing an exquisite diamond to a young couple shopping for an engagement ring. He had the diamond up under a light in a pair of tweezers as he expounded about color, clarity, and cut. He was really “romancing the stone”! Noticing a speck of dust he inhaled to blow it off the diamond. Just then the tweezers snapped, shooting the diamond like a bullet into the back of his throat. He gagged! He swallowed a nine-thousand dollar diamond in front of his customers. It was vital and it was urgent! Five days later the diamond was retrieved. Five days of “diamond in the rough.” In a news article about the incident the last line stated, “The customers decided on another stone.”

Red activities often catch us off guard, but when they occur we know we must take action. Red activities put us in a state of upheaval and plans are put on hold in order to address these unexpected events.

Some examples, other than swallowing a diamond, are: the system is down; a customer has just asked for a proposal and they want it now; your child fell off the monkey bars at school and has to be taken to the hospital for stitches; an immediate request from your manager; computer failure, etc! These kinds of activities are no-brainers. They occur, we respond!